Mobile Procurement and the Fiscally Responsible Executive

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Ivy Montgomery of Vroozi. This is a series of posts on real-life uses for mobile procurement.

They might not seem competitive in the traditional sense of the word, but the fiscally responsible executive is always keeping score. They know budgets, projections, revenues, margins, and other pertinent financial figures off the top of their heads – and they want to win. Badly. This is true regardless of whether they’re at work, at home, or thousands of miles away on vacation. Case in point: Ryan.

Ryan is the CFO of a publicly traded company. He also happens to be away on vacation in Maui, a well-deserved break from years of hard work. By successfully managing cash flow and profit margins, he has successfully led the company from the brink of financial failure to become one of the street’s biggest success stories in just a few short years.

Like all CFOs, Ryan knows that he can never be satisfied. He knows that he can never let his foot off the pedal, even during vacation. But with his daughter off to college in a few months and this being their last family vacation together, he doesn’t want to spend much time on the computer either. Luckily, he doesn’t have to, thanks to his organization’s mobile-first procurement platform.

While relaxing on the beach, the aforementioned platform notifies him – via his mobile device – that the IT department has submitted a $55,000 request for servers to accommodate new customers joining their SaaS platform. Ordinarily, such a request would require a lengthy budget analysis, not to mention several emails and phone calls. Eventually a decision would be made, but there would be no guarantee that it was the right decision until well after the fact. In the meantime, he would just have to trust the data available to him at the time, even if it was a few weeks old.

Not exactly a relaxing day on the beach, in other words.

But Ryan and his organization’s procurement platform are far from ordinary. Instead of the time-consuming scenario outlined above, Ryan is able to quickly view the company’s current anticipated spend against budget. From there, he can review the requests on the number of customers planned and expected revenue and make a fast decision that enables the company to grow while not slowing down anyone else in the process. In fact, the speed of his response even caught the IT department a bit off guard. But the best part of all: he isn’t missing out on any time with his daughter.

There is no magic formula for financial success in the business world. It’s not about how many hours you work or how strict you are with the budget approval process. In fact, these are usually counterproductive. Instead, it’s about working smarter with a procurement policy that provides accessible, accurate, and real-time data by which to base one’s decisions. It’s about having a procurement platform that was designed for modern business, one that enables CFOs like Ryan to make the right decision from any device or location without having to crunch numbers all day.

To some, procurement tools are simply a means to an end, a way to purchase the goods and services needed to keep the business up-and-running. The fiscally responsible executive knows better. They know that the procurement process is now a mission-critical part of the organization. They know that it’s not a cost center, but rather a potentially significant value add. By freeing an organization from the burdens of traditional procurement – characterized by bureaucracy and inconsistency – large organizations can move with the speed and agility needed in today’s fast-paced business environment without breaking a sweat.